A life changing day.
May 25th, 1975. Memorial Day Weekend. I was 14 years old, close to 15. My best friend, his folks and about 6 or 7 others of us loaded up all our motorcycle's to head out to the desert east of Palm Springs California for a three day weekend of motorcycles, BBQ and fun. We raced, we did crazy things to see who was best at rock climbing, hill climbing, insane stunts and we all were having a great time.
After lunch on Sunday, I was kicking back in a hammock and fell asleep. When I woke up, there were only a couple of people at camp. I went looking for my motorcycle, a Rickman Micro Matese frame and body with a Yamaha 100 engine. No where to be found. My best friend Bobby had taken off with it. No problem, his sister tossed me the keys to Bobby's Yamaha 360 enduro.
I decided to head up to a large open area to practice some various techniques. To get where I wanted to go meant a 5 minute ride on a dirt road that had a dirt mountain on one side and was flanked by the California Aqueduct on the other. I was normally religious about safety gear, but instead of boots, leathers, gloves and full face helmet I took off in jeans, a t-shirt and tennis shoes...no helmet.
I had been on the road less than two minutes, and was making a right hand turn around a broad corner, a blind corner obscured by a mountain of dirt. Suddenly my world went black. I woke up to the sound of something landing hard on a gravelly road. The "Ka-thud" sound was my body hitting the road. I would learn later that the car that hit me head-on was a Baja Bug, they was traveling at an excessive rate of speed on the wrong side of the road. As the car and motorcycle hit, the flared fender shattered my left knee cap, ripping the leg almost entirely off. The muscles were ripped, the tendons torn, and the main artery for the leg was torn. The force of the impact knocked me forward, leaving an imprint of the motorcycle handle bars on my chest.I was then tossed in the air, landing hard. It is impossible to describe the amount of pain that was coursing through my body. My right arm hurt so I turned toward it and saw the bones sticking out through the skin and blood dripping off the exposed bone..."drip, drip, drip", that's gross, I thought as I turned away. What's wrong with my leg? I then realized I could not see out of my left eye. Gingerly using my left hand I reached up to touch my eye...I felt unfamiliar material on my face and eyebrow..I slowly pulled a couple of pieces of bloody gravel off my face. The guy driving the aka bug came running up, can of Budweiser in hand..."Oh Sh*t, Iam so sorry, I didn't see you, are you ok? I think I broke my right leg, I know I broke my right arm and there is something wrong with my left eye. A couple of my friends who heard the accident came running up. One of them looked at me and promptly turned away and puked. My best friend's sister came up and grabbed my left hand, " it's gonna be ok, my dad will be here soon. He showed up and asked me where I was hurt. I repeated that I thought my right leg and arm were broken. He said "how does your left leg feel?", I thought about it and I said "I can't feel my left leg." He started cutting away my blue jeans, at first on my left leg that was bleeding so badly but then Joanna said, dad, is that bone? I learned later that the thick bone by my right hip had broken and was shoved through the skin and tore a hole as the bone came through my blue jeans. While they were working on me, all I could think of was how thirsty I was... Someone offered me a cold beer and I said "yes, please!", but Joanna's dad said "no, nothing to eat or drink, your going to need surgery". All I could think is "great, it's 110 degrees and Marcus Welby won't let me have a cold one". The pain was getting pretty hard to take and one guy said "hey man, I got some qualudes, you want some?" "No, I'll wait for the ambulance". Two and a half hours after the accident the ambulance finally got there. Back in 1975, most private ambulance companies were owned by mortuaries. This was no different, but when I saw the "Fitzhenry Ambulance" in my mind I thought "Fitzhenry Funeral Home" and for the first time I thought maybe I was really in some serious trouble. They put an air splint on my left leg, did nothing for my right arm or my right leg(they were afraid they would make things worse). I asked for pain medicine and that was when I learned that it was a "basic life support" ambulance. No IV, no pain medicine, basically a "scoop and run". Every bump we hit made the loose ends of broken bone move and the pain was excruciating.
Finally, after an hour of torture in the ambulance, after bleeding and feeling the blood saturate my clothes, we arrived at Indio Memorial Hospital. I could see my mom, almost hysterical pacing back and forth. They opened the back of the ambulance and pulled the gurney out. It stopped suddenly, but the blood that had been leaking out both my legs and my arm, did not. With a loud sloshing sound, a wave of blood spilled out the end of the gurney. I watched what little color was in my mom's face fade and down she went. They got me into the emergency room and a flurry of activity began. As luck would have it, one of the best orthopedic surgeons in the area was there in the emergency room. I only heard a few words, but I heard "AMPUTATION" loud and clear. " MOM" I yelled,"don't you let them cut my leg off!" The surgeon came over and knelt down so he was eye level with me. "Eddie, we need to save your life.I'm gonna fix your legs the best I can, but you have been injured very badly, and you have lost a lot of blood".
They had finally given me some Demerol for the pain and a sea of faces floated by. I met a surgeon who spoke of repairing a Laceration to my Cornea. All kinds of words I had never heard before and did not have a clue as to their meaning. Suddenly a mask was being placed on my face and I was told to breathe...things slowly turned black as I listened to the beep beep beep of the cardiac monitor.
I woke up terrified. At first I was only aware that I could not move...anything....I could not see right.....there was a patch over my left eye. My left arm had two IV's in it, with a board to keep me from bending it. My right arm had a plaster cast on it and my fingers were so puffy they did not look like they were mine. My left leg also had plaster cast on, but to my relief at least the leg was there…my right leg-what the heck was that thing? It had sheepskin under the skin, a large contraption that resembled the San Francisco Bridge. Most troubling were four shiny metal pins sticking out of my knee and the large screw that went in one side of the shin bone and out the other. My mouth was dry like cotton and the pain throughout my body intense. The site of a clear tube with yellow fluid running through it made me wonder "what the???". As I looked under the covers I learned what a condom catheter was.
A few hours later and I was back in surgery. Turns out that part of the thigh muscle was caught in between the broken ends of the thigh bone. Over the next 6 weeks my weight dropped from 130 pounds down to 75 pounds (and that with a walking cast on). The doctor told my mom he was seriously concerned I would die of malnutrition... It was not that I did not want to eat, but I truly did not like the hospital food.
I missed most of my sophomore year of
High school, physical therapy the cause for most of it. At the end of summer school, the last day, as I struggled to walk to the bus stop, our black custodian watched me, and mistaking my spastic limp for an attempt to be cool, said "keep working it my brother, you'll get it"...
Two years after the accident, I sat in the orthopedic surgeons office, still in pain, my limp getting worse and worse. As he looked at the x-rays he said"well, the problem is easy to see, but the fix, more difficult to fix. He explained that because of my age, and the fact that my right femur was broken in multiple places, but specifically at the growth plate, now my right leg was a fell one inch shorter than my left. He explained that in order to repair it, I would need to graduate high school a year early so that I could spend a full year in the hospital. He explained the operation where they would place a screw mechanism in my thigh so every week they could stretch the bone a little bit more. He explained the risk of infection, that if the bone became infected, once again I may be faced with the risk of amputation. Also, addiction to pain killers due to their long term use. Yet, when faced with living with the pain for the rest of my life, the operation seemed reasonable.
My mom & stepdad had decided to divorce, and my mom chose to move back to Canada, and my stepfather left and I never saw him again. My mom told me it was time to get ready to move, and I said "I'm not moving, my friends are here & this is where I want to be". Within a week, I had a new job and a place to live. I worked hard and carried a heavy load to make sure I could graduate early.
Due to all the time I spent in hospitals, I seriously considered Medical School. I began attending classes at a local community college. I enrolled in a class to become an Emergency Medical Technician. I became certified at the age of 16 as an Emergency Medical Technician 1A(one of the youngest in the nation). They have since changed the requirements and now you must be 18 years of age to even enroll. I graduated high school at the age of 16, and made an appointment with my doctor.
Without having a family to support me, he strongly recommended against the planned surgery. He said there were two other factors influencing his decision. The first, was a change in the view of the medical community on the wisdom of doing a surgery with such a high risk of serious complications. The second reason was a personal one. After being a surgeon for over two and a half decades, he was Disillusioned with the profession and the plaque of lawsuits. He said "I have always said "never complain unless you are willing to do something to bring about change". So he decided to give up medicine and become a lawyer, specializing in medical defense cases.
Having started working in a hospital, I was leaning toward going to medical school. I applied and was accepted to a university half way across the country as a pre-med major. I did well in school but was continually plagued by knee pain. The 18 aspirin a day my doctor had me on did little to ease the pain. The early testing I did was encouraging to me to go to medical school. One biology professor was the first to give me an idea it may not be as easy as I hoped. He asked me how I was going to pay for school. I said I planned on financial aid and school loans. He said " you had better have a back-up plan". Why do I need a back up plan? He said "we have all the white middle class doctors this country needs". I said "what is that supposed to mean?" He said "there is only so much money to go around, and it goes to those least represented in the fields today". He said "take a look at Nursing, you will get great experience, make a decent wage and you can go anywhere in the world you want. Then, if you still think Medical school is the way to go, you have several classes out of the way, practical bedside experience, it's a win-win scenario. Since my local community college was rated #2 in the state for Nursing, I enrolled there while applying for financial aid/student loans for medical school. To my amazement, I qualified for 18% of the cost of tuition per year. On to plan "B", Nursing School.
Also, to a new doctor. My doctor examined my knees and said he was very concerned. The X-Rays showed joints he would expect to see in someone who was 70 or 80 years old. He also got the records from my accident. He showed me that my previous doctor had stated "patient will likely require complete knee and hip replacements bilaterally by the age of 40. It is unknown at this time if he will be able to tolerate the pain from these injuries and maintain full time employment. I asked "why didn't he tell me this?". My new doctor said "too often, we plant the idea and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. He recommended surgery on both knees immediately.
I woke up and knew something was different. Soon I was going to Physical Therapy 3 times per week. After two months the pain was so bad the surgeon said "I need to go back in"...
This started a trend, and for the next 16 years I had 2-3 operations each year, just so I could walk.
Finally in 1991, a surgeon came up with a unique solution-since the kneecap has all the damage-lets remove it. After 3 months of research I said yes and it was done. Post-op, the surgeon said "well Ed, I know why you have been in so much pain". "Why, I asked incredulously?" He showed me a picture-underneath my kneecap was a hole in my femur the size of a silver dollar. I had essentially been walking on a broken leg for 16 years. The sad part? In 1983, my surgeon did a CT scan and saw the area of damage-he dismissed it and said "there is no way there is healing bone there that long after the trauma". After I healed from that surgery I became very active, hiking, geocaching, mountain climbing, etc. my overall health Improved dramatically.
I originally only intended to tell the story of how a drunk driver impacted my life, yet there were so many facets I had to expound the scope. I had a great career as a Registered Nurse, Cardiovascular Nurse Specialist and Chief Flight Nurse. Ironically, one of my last air ambulance flights I sustained a career ending back injury. While working, I met and married the love of my life(33 years of marriage & counting, two sons, one granddaughter). Life is good. When you read my story, some parts may seem socially or politically incorrect-I merely told it, as it happened. I did not try to vary or change details to make it better or more acceptable, merely just told it like it happened. Sadly, my wife was also hit by a drunk driver and she continues to live in pain because of it. I am not telling you not to drink-that is your decision. I am asking, pleading with you, please don't drink and drive.
